distutils as an application installer?

[PurpleServerMonkey]

Was hoping someone could take a quick look at my distutils problem and
give it a quick sanity check.

Basically I have a server application (for Linux) that I want to
install to /usr/local/<server directory>, this location would have
subdirectories for the daemon scripts, log files, plugins etc.

After reading a bunch of distutils documentation it appears that the
only good way out of this is to have my packages install to the system
wide site-packages directory. Then using the data_files command in
setup.py have it copy across an initial skeleton copy of the server
directory and finally install the startup scripts.

Does this sound correct, any other suggestions?

The distutils documentation doesn't cover this scenario and I've spent
days searching for information so any assistance is greatly
appreciated.